Friday, April 11, 2008

Lunch with a Truther

Twenty-first century etiquette conundrum: what do you do when an important American man invites you to lunch in their private members club to discuss business...and then you find out that they are a raging conspiracy theorist and you disagree with almost everything they say( and you've heard it all before and read the silly arguments and websites - as well as the rebuttals).

It was my fault. I should have realised that there might be problems when he refused to meet anywhere that had CCTV. Hence the club, which he joined to avoid the problem.

Do you...

a) Smile politely and try to change the subject (that didn't work)b) Get stuck into a debate and try not to jump up and shout 'House!' or 'Mornington Crescent!' when he mentioned chemtrails, WTC7, lizards, UFOs, Prison Planet, JFK , the moon landingsandsheepleall in the space of fifteen minutes?c) Fake an attack of gout to disguise your mounting hysteria?

I managed a combination of a) and b) then managed to get him onside temporarily by asking (with a serious face) if he believed Bush worshipped a Satanic owl god at Bohemian Grove.

'No, it's just a networking thing' he replied.

I agreed that this was the case, and we basked in the warmth following the sudden cessation of hostilities. But we were right back on it again when lunch arrived.

I deployed my standard anti-conspiraloon tactic, nicked off the Best Page in the Universe of letting him go on and on explaining how we were all doomed because of the nefariousness of our rulers, and finally asked him if the New World Order really was all- powerful.

'Oh yes. Totally powerful across the globe'

'They can do anything they want? They'll stop at nothing? Even killing their own citizens?'

'Sure'

'So how come are they completely powerless against bloggers then? I mean, surely Alex Jones and Dylan Avery should have been vapourised by now?'

He looked cross. This is because he didn't have an answer apart from the completely lame 'they haven't worked out how to stop that yet'.

'What, they can't even track down IP addresses?

I thought that our entrenched completely oppositional positions would lead to it being the shortest lunch ever, but we chatted on for nearly two hours. I managed to stop him taking me on a guided tour of truthseeker sites on his laptop by pretending I didn't have my reading glasses. He had the manners not to point out that I had read the menu perfectly easily.

In the end we parted amiably, and kissed goodbye. I agreed to watch some film on the internet called 'Zeigeist' - and he promised he would go read the James Randi Educational Forum. 'But Press for Truth and Loose Change didn't work on me', I told him. He looked gutted that the scales remained firmly over my eyes despite exposure to these two top Truther faves.